


Showers

by CiaranthePage



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Coping, Gen, Glamour Springs Nightmares, Mild Blood, Nightmares, Post-Episode: e041-049 The Eleventh Hour Parts 1-9, Trans Taako (The Adventure Zone), Vomiting, showering to cope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-14
Updated: 2018-03-14
Packaged: 2019-03-30 21:53:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,265
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13960782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CiaranthePage/pseuds/CiaranthePage
Summary: They had gotten their hands around his neck just as Taako woke up.On the floor.Again.Apparently, having events you’d purposely suppressed and/or turned into jokes dragged back up, even as a reassurance that you weren’t a murderer, after all, had some pretty nasty side effects, like nightmares. That lasted for weeks on end without skipping a single night. Ever.(Taako has a nightmare)





	Showers

**Author's Note:**

> eyyyy so this is kind of old (I did scan over it, but this was the third or fourth draft and before today last edited in Dec) but I keep forgetting I haven't actually posted it and wanted to put something out while i was working on some of my larger pieces and a couple silly ones  
> magnus is a Good Friend and it's not relevant so i didn't tag it but he's trans as well  
> hope you enjoy!

It all felt so real.

 

Taako clutched his forearms, watching blood and tears drip down the faces of nearly every Bureau employee he’d ever met. The smell was overwhelming, heightened by the proximity of his blood and vomit soaked apron. Through his own stinging tears, he tried to remember when he’d put it on. He could’ve sworn he burned the damn thing for warmth ages ago… but then the apron didn’t matter, because he realized Merle had stopped moving completely and Magnus had grabbed his arm like an iron cuff, eyes begging for some sort of explanation and full of panic. Angus was in his lap, crying and bleeding, so much smaller now that he had curled into himself, cries grating against Taako’s heart like broken glass. He heard all of their voices, piling on top of each other, demanding to know why he’d been so, so careless, careless enough to bring his death count even higher, do you never learn? They drew closer, crowding him; he saw Merle disappear under their feet, trampled where he lied; Magnus’s eyes rolled back as he collapsed --

They had gotten their hands around his neck just as Taako woke up.

On the floor.

Again.

Apparently, having events you’d purposely suppressed and/or turned into jokes dragged back up, even as a reassurance that you  _weren’t_ a murderer, after all, had some pretty nasty side effects, like nightmares. That lasted for weeks on end without skipping a single night. Ever.

Taako was getting pretty sick of this new routine.

Straining and putting most of the weight on one arm, he pulled himself back onto the mess of pillows and blankets he usually referred to as a bed. Once he’d settled in he threw an arm over his eyes and debated whether a repeat of the dream would be worth a few more hours of restless sleep. His sleep-deprived brain quickly made the choice for him: the second he felt the sensation of thick, partially-congealed blood start to flow from his dream (yet another side effect: the hallucinations) across his hands and chest he was up and out of his room with a crash. His thoughts were racing, chanting, _Need to get away, need to wash off the blood, need to check up on the ot--_

Okay, maybe not that, as much as he wanted to; no one needed to know how much he’d underestimated the effects of reliving his final show on his psyche, or that he actually cared enough about his teammates for them to be casualties in his dreams. He had to play it cool; maybe he’d learn to meditate like he was supposed to and skip the whole sleep thing altogether.

First, a shower.

The logical thing would be to go to in his personal shower, tucked in the corner of his tiny private bathroom, but he’d had a nightmare-related incident a few days before, and he had a feeling he wouldn’t be using that bathroom until the red stains washed off the stone entirely.

(He hadn’t _meant_ to transmute the water in the shower into a downpour of blood-red wine, despite everyone’s disbelief, but anxiety, sleeplessness, and magic don’t mix particularly well.)

Luckily, the Reclaimers getting their own suite hadn’t come with a ban from the regular facilities. The communal showers were a short sprint away from the elevator to the suite, and Taako dashed across the distance faster than he managed on any given mission, hoping to avoid anyone else up in the dead of night.

Throwing open the first stall he found, he turned the dial without looking where it landed and tossed the white nightshirt and pale shorts he’d been wearing somewhere in the corner by the towels. The slam of the door was probably a bit unnecessary, but once the near-boiling water hit his skin, he couldn’t bring himself to care; he’d come here with a job to do. He scrubbed at the feeling of blood with enough ferocity to turn his skin raw, and between stripping his skin with strokes of cloth and nails he ravaged his hair with as many products as he could find, scrubbing out the smell of blood and bile. He squeezed his eyes shut, more and more sickening feelings starting to creep up on him; this was an absolute shit time for dysphoria to set in, but apparently, the universe was set on making him miserable.

Halfway through removing the fourth or fifth layer from his skin on his leg, when a particularly rough scratch almost drew real blood, he had a thought. He had been in such a hurry he’d forgotten to grab a change of clothes. A dumb move, on his part, and one he wasn’t sure how to remedy. The last time he’d done it, he just threw on the old clothes and ran back as fast as he could, but this time… well, even imaginary blood was a pain in the ass to get out of white, and he was sure as shit going to see it.

His first solution was the just levitate them to him. A quick internal check told him he didn’t have the spell slots for it: he’d have to cast Clairvoyance to see the clothes in order to cast Levitate, and with a groan he remembered that even if he’d _had_ those spell slots, his room was so low in the moonbase Levitate wouldn’t reach the clothes. " _Wait, does Clairvoyance even count as seeing for other spells?”_ he thought.

The dull thud of his head against the shower wall accompanied the realization that he would either have to suck it up and wear the hallucinated-blood-soaked clothes back to his room (his finally clean raw skin stung at just the thought) or hope he’d brought his Stone of Farspeech so he could call Merle or Magnus to bring him clothes. Neither option was anywhere close to ideal -- in fact, both were kind of shitty, in Taako’s opinion -- but they were what he had.

A glance outside the shower, over at the pile of clothes in the corner. The Stone was in his left pocket, where he usually stuffed it while out and about. By Istus, he’d remembered  _that_ but not new clothes?

Finally content with the cleanliness of his body, Taako stepped out and wrapped himself in three huge towels. He settled on the floor, almost under the counter where people were supposed to stack their stuff, his Stone weighing heavily in his hands. He felt hyper-aware of his body: the texture of the towels felt like a thousand tiny needles against his skin, his hair dripped cold trails down his back and forehead as it hung in front of him and blocked out the view of most of the room, the smell of all the different soaps and hair products burned the lining of his nose all the way to the back of his throat, not quite as bad as the blood and vomit but pretty damn close. He pushed his hair back to get rid of the water on his face, catching a glimpse of himself in the mirror.

Gods, he looked like garbage, even mostly covered by fluffy towels.

For a few minutes, he just stared at his reflection, meeting his own eyes and zoning to try to drown out the sensations on his skin. “ _You’re stalling_ ,” his tiny head-voice whispered. “ _And you know you’re stalling. Just_ call  _someone._ ”

“ _I don’t want to_ ,” he countered, sinking deeper into his pile. For a moment, he considered just leaving in the towels, but it was hard enough trying to balance all three while sitting down and he didn’t want someone to ask about them, or worse, to lose them on the way. The Stone flickered to life as his defeated sigh dusted over it. Merle or Magnus, Merle or Magnus…

The Stone glowed a pale blue as Taako channeled Magnus’s frequency into it. “Yo, Mags?” Taako whispered.

A brief, crackling silence. A surprised noise, then, “Taako?”

“The one and only. You too tired to do something for me real quick?” Keep it casual, he told himself. Had to stay casual.

“Taako, why are you awake? Did that big crash wake you up, too?” Magnus asked.

Oh, yeah, the crash of his door slamming open and his body hitting the elevator door. “Why I’m up is, hmm, none of your business. I just need that favor.”

Magnus didn’t seem soothed by this answer but still answered, “Alright. What do you need?”

“Grab me some clothes from my room and bring ‘em up to the communal showers, _please_.” The amount of effort it took to make the please come out sarcastic honestly disgusted Taako.

The shifting of bed sheets and what was probably Magnus popping his back echoed through the Stone. “Can do, but uhh, why didn’t you just use your shower?”

“You know, Magnus, I think you need to learn what ‘none of your business’ means,” Taako said, his voice starting to lose its fake calm. “Just grab me some clothes, Sideburns.”

“I’ll be up in a few minutes.” A moment, then, lost in the click of the Stone shutting off, “Wait, Sideburns?”

Taako curled further under his towel blankets, clutching the Stone tightly and loosening his grip on the pile around him. The blood was still dripping on the edges of his vision, and the longer he sat the more the smells started to resemble blood. The silence left him alone with the most sickening parts of his dream: Magnus lying on his stomach, clutching onto Taako desperately; Angus with tears streaming down his face; Merle buried under the footsteps of the crowd. The voices of the dead crept into his hearing, demanding acknowledgment and apology.

“Shut up!” Taako snapped, tugging his already drooping ears down over themselves. “Shut up, shut up, _shut up_!”

He sat like that, ignoring the searing pain in his ears that outpaced even the towels on his raw skin and the fact that his towel pile had fallen away and onto the floor, settling in his lap. He shut out everything but the throbbing in his chest until the door opened. He let go of his ears, crossed his arms and looking up with a list of excuses already ready to roll off his tongue. His eyes met those of the visitor, however, and they all died.

“Thanks, Magnus,” Taako said, letting his shoulders droop as he reached up a hand. His energy for maintaining his façade drained, he mumbled an uncharacteristic, “Sorry to wake ya.”

Magnus set the clothes in Taako’s hands, but instead of leaving to go back to bed like Taako had assumed he would, he stood in the hallway to the door, eyes scanning Taako and taking notice of the ruggedness of his appearance and red flush to nearly every inch of his skin, including the fiery red covering his ears.

“What?” Taako growled, ears flipping back against his hair and making him wince. “Let me get dressed.”

Magnus flinched, as though he’d been awoken from a trance. He rubbed the back of his neck nervously and asked, “Sorry, you just… look pretty rough. Did something happen…?”

“Did I not tell you over the St --”

“Taako.”

He sounded upset, lips curled down. Taako’s ears drooped sadly, still against his head and now pointed at the floor even as he tried to glower at Magnus (curse them for being dead giveaways). “I just. Fuck, man, I had a nightmare and came to take a shower. You could’ve guessed that on your own,” he groaned, putting his head in his hands. “Step off.”

“Alright, alright,” Magnus sighed, putting his hands up in surrender. “Night, Taako.”

He left without waiting for a reply (not that one was coming), leaving Taako alone to hiss in pain and whine as much as he wanted while he got dressed. The entire outfit was baggy, which was both a relief and annoying. He hadn’t had to  _care_ about what he picked; sure, Magnus probably knew what these nights were like, but that didn’t mean he had to baby Taako.

Taako didn’t actually mind, deep down, but dammit he had a reputation to uphold.

Once he was dressed, he took a deep breath and thought to himself, _Now, I just have to pretend to sleep for a few hours and this will all go away._

Taako crept into the Reclaimer suite, letting out a relieved sigh when Magnus wasn’t waiting for him in the main living area with his puppy-eyed pity-look and a cup of Merle’s special calming tea. Taako wanted this to be unspoken and forgotten; it seemed for the moment he’d gotten his wish.

But, of course, he couldn’t get his wish that easy. The next morning, Taako was up and about last, having hoped that if he waited long enough the other two would’ve already left to train and he could eat his three cups of yogurt in peace. Instead, his exit to the kitchen was blocked by the exact cup of tea and concerned Burnsides he’d been dreading the night before. “Doing better?” Magnus asked.

Taako rolled his eyes, pushing past Magnus and sneaking the mug as he went. “Just peachy; don’t know why you’re asking.”

“Last night, you seemed --”

“Mmm, we’re not going there, compadre.”

For a split second, Magnus’s hurt face was splattered with blood, but Taako didn't look at it for long. He didn’t need to talk about it. Nobody needed to know. Taako was good out here, thank you very much.

 

Magnus didn’t bring it up again.

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading all the way to the end!! kudos and comments are greatly loved; i always love hearing what people's favorite parts are <3  
> if you want to chat more, check out my work, yell at me about my fics, etc, you can find me on tumblr [@thegempage](http://thegempage.tumblr.com/) and on twitter [@achillopal](https://twitter.com/achillopal)!! sometimes i post art of my fics and if you draw any those would be the places to submit it to me!! (and if you do that bless your soul)  
> this fic may be the first in a series but we'll see how well writing the others go  
> have a good [time appropriate word]!!  
> [tumblr link if you want to rb!](http://thegempage.tumblr.com/post/171851750468/showers-ciaranthepage-the-adventure-zone)


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